Zomato said Monday its co-founder and chief technology officer Gunjan Patidar has left the company, the latest in a string of departures at the Indian food delivery company whose shares have lost more than 57% of their value over the past year.
Patidar is the fourth co-founder to leave the company. His departure also follows the departure of Mohit Gupta, another co-founder, and two other senior executives last month.
“Patidar was one of Zomato’s first employees and built key technical systems for the company. Over the past ten years, he has also nurtured a fantastic technical leadership team capable of taking on the mantle of leading the technical function in the future. His contribution to building Zomato has been invaluable,” the Indian food delivery driver revealed in a grant application.
The exits come as Zomato chief executive Deepinder Goyal, also a co-founder, is seeking to share and delegate top responsibilities with other executives. The company appointed four CEOs in August last year and renamed the internal, broader organization ‘Eternal’.
The loss-making Zomato, backed by Ant Group, Temasek and Goldman Sachs, did not say why Patidar — or any of its other recently departed top executives — had left.
The company, which went public in mid-2021, reported a net loss of $30.4 million for the quarter ended last September.
“Fortunately, Zomato has no shortage of co-founders in its company. There’s Akriti Chopra, another executive who became a co-founder last year. […] Earlier this year, it named an executive co-founder of Blinkit (which Zomato owns) to replace one of Blinkit’s co-founders who left last year,” according to Indian news and analysis publication The Ken. wrote in a newsletter last year.
“At this point, I’m beginning to suspect that there is someone on Zomato’s corporate governance team whose full-time job is to periodically update the document that tracks who their co-founder is currently, in what company.”
